No More Subscription Fees!

Edius Tips has now been online and delivering content for twelve years! It has been a rewarding experience to give back to a community that has provided such an excellent software tool. We sincerely hope that many people have learned how to edit videos using these tutorials.

Over the years we have tried several different methods of hosting the video tutorials so that people would be able to learn online rather than order a set of DVDs. For many years we paid for dedicated servers at several different hosting sites. For those who have looked into that you will know that this costs about $3000 USD/year. To help cover the cost we set up a subscription program where people could sign up for a month, six months, a year or a lifetime membership. We really appreciate the many people who signed up and helped us out with the costs of this site.

Today, the field of video content delivery has changed dramatically from when we first started this site. YouTube allows people to deliver videos at no cost to the producer. It also provides many advantages over what we are able to offer, streaming them from our own dedicated server. Here are some:

YouTube takes our video tutorials and re-encodes them at six different bit rates. The user can choose the bit rate that plays the best for their internet connection speed. (To experiment with this check out the setting options by clicking the YouTube wheel icon)

YouTube replicates the videos and posts them to a number of servers around the world so that people will be able to access the content from a server close where they live, rather than try and play it from our dedicated server in Chicago. This provides a greater viewing experience to our many international students.

The quality of the HD video at full screen, provided by YouTube is much better than what we were able to stream from our dedicated server. (This will be most notable on our latest tutorials since we started uploading higher resolution videos to YouTube.) To view the tutorials at Ediustips full screen, just click on the small rectangle icon in the bottom right corner. Use your esc button to get back.

People can choose to turn on the auto generated closed captioning provided by YouTube.

I am pleased to announce that with the re-design of our site, we have decided to make ediustips.com accessible to all student for free. I recognize that those who have paid for a lifetime membership may feel that their value may have been diluted by this decision and I am sorry for that. But I feel that for the reasons listed above that the time has come to improve the site and make the content more accessible to all. I have kept a record of all of those who have signed up for a lifetime subscription so that if I ever do go back to a subscription model for any new content that we might add in the future, those individuals will have full access to that material with no additional fees.

Thank you for your understanding. Here are some more reasons why we come to this decision.

With YouTube hosting our videos, we no longer have to pay for the expensive dedicated server. We have been able to downgrade to a VPS server and this has dramatically reduced our hosting costs. This reduces our need to try and recover our costs through subscription fees. Now, the funds that we get from advertising, should cover the VPS server and we are able to offer the content freely to all.

We have found that many of our viewers are students and/or are living in a country where people have not yet started using credit cards and found it difficult to subscribe to our service. Now they will be able to access all of our content either directly from YouTube or right here at the ediustips website without having to have a credit card.

We are also hoping that it will reduce the hundreds of attempts we were getting every month of people or bots trying to sign up to the site through some kind of hack. Now everyone can just come and use the site for free. No need to try and hack a membership!